Rite of Eventide
by CelticFeather
Summary: Enticed by the song of the night, a certain Prussian soldier and Hungarian rebel get down to business. FotV. M.


_A/N: _Just to see if I could. Have fun.

Loosely set between chapters 15 and 16.

* * *

"Gilbert, have you seen Paris before?"

"Nope. Lucky me huh? I get to spend my leave in places whose names I can't pronounce."

"Do you know why the streets of Paris are lined with trees?"

The Prussian crinkled his brow quizzically. "Why?"

"So Germans wouldn't get sunburned on victory parades."

Gilbert snorted at the absurdity of the statement. Stingy little witch. But the ghost of a smile traced around the corners of his lips as he rolled his eyes, which allowed themselves into a laugh.

"It's cold." Elizabeta mumbled somberly.

"I know." The breath billowed from his teeth and crystallized into ice on its way to her face, which he imagined did not make her feel better. He suddenly felt guiltier than he usually would when blowing cigarette smoke at a woman. Gilbert tugged her close around her shoulders and she leaned her head into the gap of his neck, though he imagined it wasn't comfortable, and they sat to let their little campfire warm some blood back into their marrow.

Their meager belongings lay settled against a tree, illuminated by gentle flickers of firelight. A rifle. A pistol. A knife. A last few scraps of not particularly appetizing rabbit meat they had saved and quickly ate. The autumn air was cold enough to crack stones, a biting edge on bare skin as thick as a flake of obsidian. The shiver of black birch leaves in the high slow night wind was the sole sound. But within the ring of white bands the fire fanned against the papery birch trunks the air felt not so cold. It was lower, denser, wetter, stiller, like the spray of blue stars that streaked in a band across the sky was only just painted above the treetops. There was a comforting closeness to it.

With the wordless esoterics of rebellious schoolchildren Eliza and Gilbert understood what was to be done this night. They would have done it earlier but last night consisted of far more important things, primarily gaining as much distance as possible from their escape point before their absence was noted. When they had finally stopped running they were too exhausted to do much else than collapse against an oak tree and hope they awoke in the morning. Even tonight they knew undertaking the action was not the healthiest of their ideas. But they were young and wild and hungry, and the freedoms of the night beckoned. Any consequences would be staved off until morning.

There stirred a twinge of hesitation in Gilbert as he looked up at the stars. The stars always seemed closer the colder it was. He wondered if while he would be doing this, Ludwig was looking at the same spray of lights worrying about where he was.

Elizabeta watched with a tight smile and a barely suppressed eye-roll as Gilbert pulled off his boots but neatly placed the laces inside to avoid them getting damp. She could then imagine him in a cheerfully didactic fashion explaining to her the importance of making sure one's shoelaces were dry and not decomposing lest they untangle in battle. She was enchanted by his nuances. The way he looked: the not quite platinum blonde hair and not quite brown eyes he had claimed. Probably one of the few boys who would have arm wrestled her without holding back back in the day. The way he retained humor in darkness, the obnoxious laugh. Down to the funny Prussian way he pronounced her name._ El-ee-tsa-FEY-ta_. Sometimes he got lazy and swallowed the last a, like it were an ignored German h after a t.

She liked him too much to betray him. Whether she would use that other L word, Elizabeta was not yet sure. She could not discount the decisions he had made in his past. But for now, she would trust him.

"Wait. Gilbert, there's something I have to tell you."

"Oh _relaaax_. I have a breeding pass."

She showed no mirth at the joke. Round Hungarian eyes flashed nervously. "You do understand, from the camp what we all have, what you might..."

"You think," Gilbert was surprisingly firm, "fighting for years in muddy holes with a hundred other filthy starving men, Ludwig and I haven't seen a louse before?"

She too removed her shoes.

"Can't say I've done it on the ground before." Elizabeta said with a lazy smile.

_So she isn't a virgin!_ Gilbert's eager thoughts exclaimed. He had been wondering that. Elizabeta was proud and domineering, but in her early twenties she was too old to have remained untouched. She didn't have enough reverence for the male species to save herself until marriage. Gilbert didn't mind, at least she would know what she was doing. All of that first-time screaming would not have been beneficial to their situation anyhow.

"I did it against a cement wall once. Can't be too different."

"Suppose it'll hurt?"

"Now darling, either way we wouldn't be doing it right if we weren't sore."

Their eyes locked for a moment of silent study, gauging the other. Each intelligent, tentative, like fighting dogs sizing each other up but without the hostility. To see how they would start.

When Elizabeta was undoing the silver buttons along his sternum her fingers strayed to his left breast. A cryptic line of brightly embroidered tiny rectangles, some adorned with even tinier sculpted metal eagles and swords, banded themselves horizontally above the pocket. She could tell the man had sewed them on himself because his stitchwork was horrendous. Some sort of military decorations. A test formed itself in her mind. "What you get all these for?"

His alert gaze darted suddenly towards the darkness, finding distraction in the snap of a nonexistent twig under the paw of an invisible fox.

She coyly fingered the short sturdy ribbon of another separate medal and displayed it to him encouragingly, probing for specificity. She had him where she wanted him, and it wouldn't be unlike him to slip and claim glory for his deeds. "What was this one for?"

"Not dying."

She tugged at his Iron Cross, her nimble fingers slipping under the fabric to pull it taught against his throat, knowing she had ensnared him. "And this one?"

"Killing people."

"This is an opportune moment to show off, Gilbert." she prompted, her voice low and seductive.

"I'm not in the mood for war stories." With the unyielding fluidity of a spring knife he pounced. His hands ignored the classic ruses- no pretending to brush a strand of hair from her face before leaning in to claim a kiss. He was a straightforward man with unambiguous intentions. His lips closed rightly with hers, and as their positions shifted his weight began to pin her to the firewarmed earth. They undressed each other, making sure none of the clothes lay too close to the fire.

Elizabeta was sloughing off Gilbert's black suspenders when he had undone her thin gray and white striped shirt. She was without a brassiere, of course. Her cold pricked breasts were soft and small, but they were there. Despite her incarceration Elizabeta remained several shades darker than Gilbert. Her smooth skin had retained vestigial melanin of the southern Magyar sun, of golden days spent slashing neighborhood boys with wooden swords and baking mud pies on the banks of the Danube. She was boyish and lithe, her limbs thin but her core strong, the indent of her spine and the cage of her ribs evident in the light. Dark downy hair flitted naturally along her skin and her loose umber curls looped around her throat and dripped down her back. The fire drew angular gray and orange shadows across her clavicle, waxing and waning with the breath of flame. Gilbert believed that long ago, beneath all of this hunger and dirt, in the golden sunlit streets of a foreign city, she was very beautiful.

The Prussian however, was not quite so svelte. Eliza's eyes feasted upon what she before had only grazed with her fingerpads, registering the sight with a gasp. Gil relished the noise with a cunning grin. He was not a cold bluish sort of pale, but white hot like a marble statue basking in the sun. His colorless hairs gleamed golden along the border of his legs, backlit by the fire. Like a thundercloud at sunset. Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose beneath skin, smooth and hard like river stones under his broad flat pectorals. His shoulder blades jutted like dual arrows along the curve of his back and every sinew in his arms rippled in a wave under his skin with the prowess of movement. The new and faded scars of Ares's kiln slashed across his flesh. Needless to say, the soldier was shredded.

Instinctively they pressed their hot skins together against the cold Polish night. To Gilbert her excited pulse was warm and rapid like a sparrow's. The notches in their ribs fit together as they kissed and smooth tan artful hands explored alongside wide white calloused ones. He easily gripped her closer by the waist, his superior size and strength closing the distance. He could take her. Swallow her. Hungarian fingers trailed down his flank and drifted inevitably south.

Elizabeta's capable hands wove towards his crotch and his arousal was quickly coaxed to life by her touch. She noted Gilbert was large, not grossly so. The fitting natural sort of largeness portrayed in the masculine straight of his nose and the breadth of his wide knuckled hands.

They broke from their kiss and she began to stroke him off, starting slow at the tip and firm at the wrist before progressing to cover more area. He hardened further as she rubbed him, the hot yearning ache of his member pressing against her hand as she advanced her speed. She stroked him thoroughly, but not fast enough to be light and sloppy. His panting eclipsed the sound of the wind and fire.

With a final brisk swipe, Elizabeta removed her fingers from his rock hard shaft and distanced her body for a moment. A break in Gilbert's breathing pattern betrayed his irritation. "Liz what are you d..."

His sentence broke off into the crisp autumn night, his lips freezing at the same moment hers bore down over the head of his cock.

His choked, shocked, boyish surprise amused Elizabeta heartily. That the adaptable soldier who at one point had heard shellfire nightly could be so stiffened by her subtle actions. She would have laughed.

Without any other form of torture she pursed the bow of her lips, just at the tip of his head. Darting round hot licks that cooled in the autumn air and slowly advancing up his shaft. The undulation of leathery lips, warm and strong, the pulsation of the dexterous muscle of her tongue, left Gilbert muttering mindless encouragement in a language too swift for her understand.

Her attention to detail was impeccable. In comparison to the icy air it was heavenly. It felt so good, so delicious, to have her encompassed around him. With an authoritative testosteronized jolt Gilbert realized he needed every inch of those slick lips, that wet mouth, that boiling throat engulfing him. No, not just _needed_, he would have. His strong hand kneaded itself in Eliza's hair and pushed her head upwards along his shaft. His tip skidded against her palette and jut against the moist back of her throat.

"Weiter!" he barked. _Further!_ In the familiar military I'll-have-what-I-want-way.

A wave of anger surged through Eliza's veins from his uncouth shove. She did not know what his past was, if he'd raped anyone before. But she was too stubborn to let him enjoy complete dominance. This was a mutual act. She was not a hole in a tree to be fucked.

She retaliated with a measured nip to his tender length, her small white teeth pricking at his engorged skin near the base. A doggish yelp of protest escaped his lips above, which had been formerly bared in command. Her challenging eyes flashed up to accost his, silently daring him to yank her again. His hips were rolling, so close, ravenous to finish what she had started. She had him at her mercy. And when Gilbert looked thoroughly sorry for his rudeness, she continued her task. She was not totally merciless.

Her fellatio resumed with her arsenal of long licks and vigorous suction, lapping along past the ridges of his head and the hard smoothness of his length and the softer weaker yielding flesh in areas further up. With every inhalation his scent engulfed her. She advanced, occasionally releasing him to allow her tongue to slither up and claim more. Accelerating her suckling when she closed on him, she began to taste a leaking liquid with a saltiness bitterer and fattier than sweat.

Gilbert's quickened panting, the contraction alerted her of what was coming. He breathed a curt warning to her. She felt it first, the twitching pulsation at her lips and she braced to hold her breath. Then an explosion rippled forth and he pumped his viscous load into her. She felt the strong pulse of thick sticky liquid fill the cavity of her mouth before shooting down the tunnel of her throat.

She swallowed, of course. She could use it.

Gilbert leaned back, spent, his long legs spread along the ground, tilting his chin towards the stars to breathe and closing his eyes. Eliza lowered and wiped a tendril of saliva on her wrist.

"That was the first time I had done that." she admitted.

"Thought so. Didn't take you for a whore."

Her actions weren't common for the time. Usually only prostitutes did that.

"Was it... Good?"

"Yeah. J-just give me a minute to..." His lungs expanded out in exhausted pants, his head still abuzz. Gilbert had not anticipated such generosity, but he would never had refused. Gil wasn't sure if his knees would obey him if he needed to stand up. Luckily he didn't anticipate he'd have to.

Aware he would need a moment to recharge, and too cold to stay apart, Elizabeta initiated a soft kiss. The sweetness of tobacco, the sulfur of gunpowder, the oily residue of rich pine radiated from the soldier's skin. Gilbert noted Eliza did not smell of cultivated flowers or frivolous femininity. She smelled of salt and sweat, ash, urea, confidence and estrogen. The pheromonal tang of arousal. Tasteful and attractive, not the harsh chemical smell of a rose.

It was common knowledge amongst the guards that he needn't fear the consequence of his actions. Any of the women after a week of captivity were unfit for that sort of strain on their body. The monthly curses stopped naturally once their body fat dipped beneath a certain percent. Pregnancy was impossible. A convenient survival mechanism for the mother. Equally convenient for him.

Their eyes touched briefly, needing no further communications, and their positions changed, her thighs milky in the moonlight spreading to better accommodate access. His pelvis aligned itself above her dark triangle and he inhaled once.

He slid into her with a single, smooth thrust. Her fingers clutched firstly at the dust, and when he leaned back they grasped at his wrist. A soft moan like the whisper of water over stones, the sigh of some elusive forest nymph, drew itself from Eliza's lips at his movement against her hot cavern. The sound was more pure and honest, desiring but not fiendish, more human, than any the soldier had ever heard. And in that instance, he felt maybe, he wasn't going to hell for rescuing a prisoner who let him use her body. She had forced him to wait until they were out of camp, until the guard and the guarded were on equal footing, until she opened herself to him. Gilbert had not defied all he had known for something as common as sex. In some paradoxical way, he was nobler than that.

He allowed an egress, and she inhaled greedily at the sudden release of pressure, then he plunged in again. The rest was biology. He was mindful in a subconscious way, he liked Elizabeta. Despite calls of bravado deep down he did not want to hurt the little bird. Elizabeta felt her tailbone arch catlike further into the flaky detritus at his movement. Her toes curled. She bit softly into the slanting tendon that ran from his shoulder to his neck, her fingers slipping behind him and splaying along the hard indent of his spine where the wide bulging muscles of his back poured smoothly into like a wave. Tracing the indents of his vertebrae, knobs easy to feel high by his neck but indiscernible further down. She kneaded her fingers on his firm haunches. His hands slid down from her breasts along her muscled flanks, needing the friction to leech the heat from his palms.

His exhalations timed with each plunge. Hazed in bliss, Gilbert fell into rut, lustful with no particular pattern or rhythm to his actions. Her ridged fleshly walls encompassed him as he sheathed himself deeper in her molten core, the pulsation of Eliza's heart and the shiver of her pleasure serving as his only clock.

Some steaming internal muscles squeezed deep within her to clamp around his rod as she writhed beneath. An impatient unsatiated hunger broiled in his gut to elicit a lustful groan and his clawlike grip tightened on her wrist. Gilbert's actions acquired a desperate determination as his previously varied wanton ramming gained a disciplined fiery rhythm. He pressed against her, burrowing in as deeply against her folds as he could. A heated sensation like faint sparks arched from the tip to the base of his shaft and he sensed his flesh taughten. He felt his semen traveling the tubes from his balls to his tip. His breath caught, and in a wave of euphoria he convulsed one final massive time and jetted inside her melting walls, hot warmth spilling notably to them both. Elizabeta's nails snatched reflexively at whatever flesh they happened to be grazing and she muttered something he didn't understand.

The last waves of his orgasm faded and he felt himself go soft inside her, she straightened, and he clumsily removed his length. Their arms went weak and buckled to deposit their panting anatomies softly in the dust. White breath like ropes of sand uncoiling on an ocean floor escaped from their lips to condense in the algid air. His body ached, but despite his exhaustion he turned to sneak a glance at the woman. The intense rose exercise left on Elizabeta's cheeks alerted him his performance had been... sufficient.

The stars dyed their white forms faint blue against the dark earth and they let the sweat-cooled animal of their bodies curl against one another. They listened. To the dying crackle of coals. To Gilbert's heavy horselike gallop of a heartbeat. The little murmurs of Eliza's belly. He held her hard padded feet against his stomach to warm them. Her tired arms tangled behind his head, hair slicked to the back of his neck with sweat that refused to freeze. He felt her breathe, her diaphragm expand and her ribs fan calmly in and out, and in his relaxed state his own respiration synchronized itself with hers. Combining to gently pulse and wane like a candle flame.

In a brave motion Eliza rolled away and snatched the dense black coats laid on the ground before returning to the sanctuary of Gilbert's heat. They didn't bother to wear them fully, only to shell them across their backs as blankets against the the bitter outside. His heavy muscled left arm draped lazily around her yielding waist, his right pinned and warm underneath her. Her feet entwined themselves like vines with his shins and ankles, each pressing and curling with each other to secure the most heat.

Gilbert wondered briefly if he should whisper something. Even a simple goodnight. To acknowledge her. But the world was silent, unmarred by high throaty human voices, and he was content to keep it that way. Always there seemed to be noise. A distant airplane, booms from a nearing front, the rattle of crematoria. But the fire was dead and even the creatures of the night respected the peace. Some communications needn't be spoken. Like her, his strong heart beating slowly and satisfiedly, a small smile plastered on his face and he ceded to the calm vagary of dreams.


End file.
